CK3 Dev Diary #32 - Going Medieval on Audio

[blackninja9939]

On an unrelated note: Hello there, Emperor Buggyhoof!

Our lord and saviour Errorhoof

 

[Jazzhole]

I'm very glad that audio seems to have a lot of effort put into. Sadly the industry often focuses on graphics cause they're marketable and flashy. But graphics can never get fully realistic and completely immersive. Audio, on the other hand, can be "photorealistic", flawless, even on average audiosystem and on cheap hardware. It can be indistinguishable from reality.

CK2 had a lot of problems with audio. The sound you hear when most events trigger is 4 seconds wrong and quickly becomes an irritation. The soundtrack is nice to listen to for the first 100 hours with the game but it can't provide a good experience over countless game session you're supposed to have. Glad developers seem to realize those problems.

Soundtrack getting tiresome after 100hrs is one of the reasons we made a different music system this time around. Hopefully it will be more contextual now. Also there is more music then in any of our other titles.

//Andreas

 

[Metal King]

Is the ambience sound on the map tied to geographical location or tied to terrain type? (or something else entirely?)

Well, not to get nerdy it's a mix of different systems. Some are based on the terrain type and other ambiences are spawned based on the location.

 

[Metal King]

Sounds brilliant. Love the orchestral insight.

That ambience over the River Thames is masterful

Woooooooooah, This Dev Dairy is epic, I just love those musical themes, especially the “The Crusade Starts”

Very good and nice too read and see how the sounds and music are done.

Kudos to the sound department, brilliant.

Awesome. Nothing more to say.

Thank you so much! Will forward this to rest of the audio team.

 

[Metal King]

The music sounds appropriately epic, I love it! Amazing job!



One remark about ambient sounds in India, since you mention Dharmic holdings. The Hindu temple bell just somehow doesn't sound right. I happen to have lived 2 years next to a small Hindu temple in Delhi, and the ringing of its bells by temple-goers during the day became a natural background sound after a while.

You got the bell sound right, but the rapid sequence of 4 bell ringings feels wrong, more like a slightly stressful (!) *knock-knock-knock-knock* on a door. It could be the sound the priest makes to call devotees just before the puja (collective prayer).

In my opinion (though I'd be happy to discuss it with someone who is from a Hindu and/or South Asian background), the ambient sound of a Hindu temple, would be better represented by capturing the atmosphere of visits by casual devotees who just drop by at the temple for a quick prayer. Usually, a visitor to a temple signals its presence to the good by ringing the bell manually either once or twice, but rarely more. If the bell is heavy, the sound could be a *DONG-dong* (representing one thrust by the devotee then the swing of the clapper). If it's a lighter bell (like the one you chose), an assortment of simple *ding*'s and *ding-ding*'s would sound more realistic.

For an illustration, this video provides a very realistic example for a Hindu temple bell ambient sound:

Thanks for your kind words about the music!

Regarding the bell sounds, we do have more different recordings that you will be able to hear more of the "one-hit" and "two hits". Great observation and thanks for the feedback!

 

[Audiomancer]

Overall great stuff! Just how much will be done with zoom levels on ambience? In Total War: Three Kingdoms they were REALLY great at having audio for both zoomed in and zoomed out and in these examples we saw now it kind of sounds like something inbetween (and for the case of demonstration maybe boosted a bit?). I might be one of those weird people that just likes to randomly scoot around the world and just listen and look at everything and if it'll create performance issues I could see why you'd try to restrict the dynamics to not be that affected by zoom levels but just curious.

Dude, it is "for those weird people that just likes to randomly scoot around the world" that we do all of this for <3 Thanks for appreciating it!

What you suggest is absolutely great, and we would've definitely considered it if the map distance would have needed us to be more "intimate" on the design... but it would probably be quite difficult to differentiate the sound sources at the current zoom level we are handling in-game and that's why we mostly handled it with distance attenuation. Hope that explains it!

 

[Jazzhole]

Knights of Jerusalem legit made me cry. And I cried only on few music compositions from various movies and especially Luminescence from Stellaris. I think you are doing a fantastic job with the soundtrack.

Thank you, that made me so very happy!

/Andreas

 

[Jazzhole]

That Knights of Jerusalem track is really amazing. I just sat and listened through the whole thing unblinkingly before realizing that time was still passing around me. I'm really impressed and excited for the audio now. Just one more thing to be excited about I guess. Will any of the CK2 music make it into the game?

Thank you!
There will be some melodies/themes that reappear in one form or another, but there wont be any reuse of full CK2 tracks. We just had another vision for the implementation of music and audio this time around. Reusing them as they are/were would not fit in this design.

 

[Metal King]

Again, I'm so happy to see so much positive reaction! Thank you all so much!

 

[Jazzhole]

Wow those guys from the Orchestra are insanely good.

Btw was this recorded before covid or during (i imagine before right)?

Im very happy with the orchestra as well!
It was recorded a few months before covid outbreak btw.

/Andreas

 

[Jazzhole]

This all sounds really awesome! Especially the cue music. Just a tiny feedback: IMO "the crusade begins" sounds better than "the crusade starts".

Haha I agree!